Target Audience: Every "accessibility superhero" who wants to punch above their weight

Skill Level: Intermediate

Overview: Accessibility professionals are driven by wanting to get organizations they work for or with to prioritize accessibility across all their digital products. They become skilled at understanding the needs of disabled people and the technologies they use to access websites and apps. They become skilled in accessibility testing and finding solutions to accessibility issues. They find success helping colleagues use WCAG 2.0, and may become their organization’s "accessibility superhero," relied on to deliver accessibility over an increasing numbers of products, day in and day out. But they are also likely to have frustrations where products they worked on didn’t live up to their values, as the people they were working with didn’t share those values. They want help to fight for accessibility more effectively, to get it taken more seriously, so they’re not the only one pushing for it in their organization and so accessibility becomes “just the way we do things around here.” This webinar gives them the framework to make that happen and build themselves a sustainable career path before all their passion and energy burns out.

Learning Objectives:

Participants will be able to:

1. Transform their organization’s attitude to accessibility from “avoiding losing” to “winning” by expanding their understanding of how to find which combination of the four main business benefits of accessibility that most motivates the organization.

2. Use their organization’s improved motivation for accessibility to generate buy-in and budget for embedding accessibility and inclusion as values and competencies in the organization’s staff and policies.

3. Enable their organization’s digital production teams to create products that are accessible by giving them a process to follow (which enriches the accessibility guidelines they already follow) that results in accessible products every time.

4. Ensure the continued funding and prioritization of their accessibility program by measuring the effect all of this has on their organization’s users/customers, brand reputation, and bottom line, so they can prove return on their investment in accessibility.

Speaker bio: Professor Jonathan Hassell is a thought leader in enabling organizations to ensure their websites and mobile apps include all audiences, including older and disabled people, with over 13 years' experience of embedding accessibility within digital production teams and sharing best practices at international conferences. He is lead author of BS 8878 – the British Standards for Web Accessibility – and author of the forthcoming book “Including Your Missing 20%: How to Make Great Digital Experiences for Everyone,” which provides a blueprint for organizations to become competent and confident in accessibility. Through Hassell Inclusion, he provides digital inclusion training and consultancy to organizations worldwide and leads innovation projects to make inclusion easier and cheaper to implement. He is the former head of usability and accessibility for BBC Future Media, where he combined usability and accessibility disciplines to support user-centered design across Web, mobile and IPTV. He has won awards for managing accessibility on projects including the video-on-demand service BBC iPlayer, the personalization tool MyDisplay, the accessibility information site My Web My Way, and the sign-language recognition game uKinect Boris Games.

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The mission of the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) is to define, promote and improve the accessibility profession globally through networking, education and certification in order to enable the creation of accessible products, content and services.

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